The Oregon Trail

by: MECC

Publication date: 1993

Topics: The Oregon Trail, Willamette, rivers, blue river, Snake River, Independence, supplies, trading, hunting

Language: English

The Oregon Trail is a series of educational computer games. The first game was originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach 8th grade schoolchildren about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon in 1848.

MECC[edit]

In 1974, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), a state-funded organization that developed educational software for the classroom, hired Rawitsch. He uploaded the Oregon Trail game into the organization's time-sharing network by retyping it, copied from a printout of the 1971 BASIC code. Then he modified the frequency and details of the random events that occurred in the game, to more accurately reflect the accounts he had read in the historical diaries of people who had traveled the trail. In 1975, when his updates were finished, he made the game titled OREGON available to all the schools on the timeshare network. The game became one of the network's most popular programs, with thousands of players monthly.^[5]^[4]^[6]

Rawitsch published the source code of The Oregon Trail, written in BASIC 3.1 for the CDC Cyber 70/73-26, in Creative Computing's May–June 1978 issue.^[7] That year MECC began encouraging schools to adopt the Apple II microcomputer.^[4] John Cook adapted the game for the Apple II, and it appeared on A.P.P.L.E.'s PDS Disk series No. 108. A further version called Oregon Trail 2 was adapted in June 1978 by J.P. O'Malley. The game was further released as part of MECC's Elementary series, on Elementary Volume 6 in 1980. The game was titled simply Oregon, and featured minimal graphics. It proved so popular that it was re-made under the same title, with substantially improved graphics and expanded gameplay, in 1985. The new version was also updated to more accurately reflect the real Oregon Trail, incorporating notable geographic landmarks as well as human non-player characters with whom the player can interact.^[8]

By 1995, The Oregon Trail comprised about one-third of MECC's $30 million in annual revenue.^[9] An updated version, Oregon Trail Deluxe, was released for DOS and Macintosh in 1992, as well as Windows in 1993 (under the title of simply The Oregon Trail Version 1.2)^[10] followed by Oregon Trail II in 1995,^[4] The Oregon Trail 3rd Edition in 1997,^[11] and 4th^[12] and 5th editions.^[13] As of 2011, more than 65 million copies of The Oregon Trail have been sold

In 1971, Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught an 8th grade history class as a student teacher.^[1]^[2] He used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on a HP 2100 minicomputer to write a computer program to help teach the subject.^[3] Rawitsch recruited two friends and fellow student teachers, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, to help.^[4]

These are the original core gameplay concepts which have endured in every subsequent version: initial supply purchase; occasional food hunting; occasional supply purchase at forts; inventory management of supplies; variable travel speed depending upon conditions; frequent misfortunes; and game over upon death or successfully reaching Oregon.^[5]

The game that would be later named The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on December 3, 1971. Although the minicomputer's teletype and paper tape terminals that predate display screens were awkward to children, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to users of the minicomputer time-sharing network owned by Minneapolis Public Schools. When the next semester ended, Rawitsch printed out a copy of the source code and deleted it from the minicomputer.